Structured Approach to Assess Third-Party Library Usage

Many software systems relay on third party libraries and if you do you should care about quality of those libraries and also of the use of those libraries, says Veronika Bauer. Often, when assessing maintainability of a system however, efforts are mainly targeted at own code base and not at libraries. This is why the authors propose a method to assess the quality of libraries and their use.

This idea is implemented into a downloadable tool and was evaluated in practice on about 3.5 MLOC of Java Code. The system’s files include 87Java Archive Files (JARs) This evaluation showed that the method is applicable and the results were consistent with the porgrammer’s gut feeling about good and bad libraries.